(five)
Waiting Room
With every staccato beat of Emily’s heels against the tile floor, Cara felt herself slipping closer to sanity’s edge. She removed her hands from her unwashed face and looked up. From where she was sitting in the corner of this sad, bare room, she could see the long stretch of hallway that lead to where they kept Dave. Emily then crossed her line of sight and then turned, her plum business suit stark against the white walls.
“God, sis, will you stop that?”
Emily sent her a glare from behind rimless glasses. Her glossed lips narrowed, then folded up, until it was no more than a little asterisk. She kept on walking.
“You’re getting on my nerves,” Cara told her.
Silence, still.
“Fine. I won’t even look at you. But could you at least take off those stupid shoes? You’re loud enough to wake the dead!”
At that, Emily finally stopped. And when Cara saw her face—drawn, distressed—she mentally kicked herself for her carelessness.
She made a move to stand up but Emily inched away from her. She sighed and settled deeper in the uncomfortable couch. “Be that way. Just—sit down, please.”
Emily looked at her distrustfully.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, sit.”
Her sister sat. But at the chair farthest from hers.
Cara closed her eyes and sighed deeply. She drew her knees up and hugged her damp legs to her chest. Gooseflesh had broken all over her skin, as she’d ran through rain in the dead of the coldest night of the year. She’d arrived at the hospital in the clothes Emily and Dave had left her in—shorts, a thin kamiseta, flip-flops. She hadn’t even had time to wear underwear. The jacket she’d pulled on, though, when she got Emily’s call, had helped a little. But she’d still gotten soaked to her skin, not to mention there had been mud streaks on her legs. An orderly had given her a towel, smiling not unkindly at her, when she’d gone to talk to Emily.
You couldn’t have chosen a better night, she called out to God.
She opened her eyes and looked at the door at the end of the hallway. The one that had a trail of blood leading to it. Still closed.
Emily was looking at her. Untouched, unsoiled, unscarred Emily.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” Cara asked her. She didn’t wait for her sister’s response. Instead, she dropped her head and rested her forehead on her cold knees.
Like a masochist asking for more, her thoughts replayed the night’s events.
Of course it would all go wrong. It was destined to be so, hadn’t Dave told her that many times, especially after they’d made love, when they were both still entwined, panting on her bed? And hadn’t she said yes although deep inside her, she denied it? After all, this was her life so it followed that she was the star. Not anyone else. Not even the golden child—little Emily with her business suit and power heels and corner office and high-rise condominium. It was her life and nothing was supposed to go wrong.
Served her right for believing that nonsense Mother kept on telling her. “You’re the star of your show,” she’d said. Cara knew now that it was all probably for Emily; she’d just happened to be in the room when the words were said.
Oh, that was the problem with her. She trusted words too much, accepted them as though they were all true. Her father had told the three of them he would come back but did he? Of course not. He’d ran off with that vile woman he’d told them to call Aunt Hilda. And when your own mother lied to you about everything running perfectly in your life, wasn’t that, in itself, a problem? More than a warning sign, she should think. Oh, and Emily. How many times had little sister told her that they were equal, that no one loved one more than they loved the other? That they were sisters, a unit, and everyone should accept them as such? That Emily would never let anything between them, not even her own perfection?
Bullshit, everything. Every single thing.
When your own family lied to you, it became so difficult to believe anything else afterwards.
But Dave. Dave, in his own tragic, fatalistic way, had told her the truth. Everything was going to go wrong, he’d said, nothing was going to last. And she hadn’t believed him. She’d chosen to think that tomorrow, everything was going to be all right; that tomorrow, she’d wake up to him lying next to her still. Oh Mother Mother Mother, you screwed me up good.
Dave the prophet, that fool. Everything had gone wrong and it wasn’t even tomorrow yet.
She raised her head once more and stared at Emily, who’d fixed her gaze at a vase full of dead flowers. She stared and stared until her little sister was forced to look.
“Was he driving?” Cara asked, a mean edge creeping to her voice.
Even with the distance, Cara could see that there were tears shimmering in Emily’s large eyes. It made her look human. She liked how it looked.
“No,” Emily said, her voice losing that strength that had everyone she met gasping, O Emily O Emily!
“Then you were driving.”
Emily removed her glasses and buried her face in her hands. But not before Cara saw the way Little Miss Perfect’s face had screwed up.
Her cries and gasps and sharp intakes of breath drowned the tiny room. Tired relatives, anxious visitors, harassed nurses and beaten doctors all looked towards her, not without a trace of pity. Oh god, even awe. Cara knew they all thought how brave she’d been that she’d kept all that grief inside her for so long. And what a martyr she was that she sat there, weeping, with a bitter, not-as-pretty woman so near yet so uncaring.
Disgusted, Cara stood up and crossed the distance between them. She pushed at Emily’s shoulders, gripped them, and angled her body so that she looked at her.
“Don’t be a baby, Emily,” she gritted.
Emily’s eyes widened with shock. A tear that had been precariously teetered between two clumps of eyelashes fell to her cheek. “H-How dare you.”
“I don’t want to play these roles again, you hear me? Stop crying.” Cara gave her prim shoulders a hard shake. “You haven’t even killed him yet.”
Emily gasped and pushed hard at Cara. Surprised—gentle Emily had never once laid a hand on her—and she stumbled, falling, only to land on the table. The vase toppled, then rolled to the floor, where it crashed with a sickening crunch.
She looked up at her little sister, towering above her. A finger was held out in front, not unlike the way a judge would give a sentence.
“You. You’d kill him. If you hadn’t…hadn’t—” She broke off with a groan and stamped her foot like a child. She was shaking with anger, an emotion Cara had never before seen in her calm and composed sister. Not even earlier tonight when she’d found her and Dave—
“How could you do this to me?” she asked Cara brokenly. “You’re my sister. I love you.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Fuck that, it does. It does to me.” Her knees gave way and she knelt on the floor, her head now tilted to meet Cara’s eyes. “But I love him too. You had no right.”
Her last words, hard, said through gritted teeth, broke Cara, even more than when she’d gotten the phone call that led her here. Even more than when she saw Emily at the foot of her bed. Even more than when she found out that everyone had lied, one by one.
Cara leaned forward, so that Emily had to raise her head higher to meet her eyes. She held out a shaking hand and put it to her sister’s cheek. And she whispered. “He isn’t yours.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. De Vera?”
A doctor, in pale blue scrubs and black Nikes. He was peeling off stained gloves from his hands and he held them out for the nurse to take. There was a diagonal red line, strangely fluid, that extended from one shoulder to his waist.
“I need to speak to Mrs. De Vera.”
Mrs. de Vera straightened. In a small but firm voice, almost reflectively, Emily said, “I’m Mrs. de Vera.”
Cara watched as the doctor told her sister the news only Dave’s wife had the right to hear.
Labels: General Fiction
posted by Sasha Martinez @ 9:16 AM
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